


The One Where Jo Harvelle Earns Her Wings

by crowleyshouseplant (orphan_account)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Body Horror, F/F, Gen, Vessel Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-26
Updated: 2012-11-26
Packaged: 2017-11-19 15:14:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/574690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/crowleyshouseplant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At the time of Jo's death, Hester brings Jo to the Green Room and asks her to be their vessel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The One Where Jo Harvelle Earns Her Wings

**Author's Note:**

> For Ashley.

Jo doesn’t remember dying. She remembers the pain, and even now she lifts her shirt up, expecting it to be thick and stiff with blood, but it’s smooth, cotton clean like the soap Mom used to use, like she had just plucked it from the clothesline and put it on.

Her belly isn’t ripped open with her guts spilling out onto the floor either. Though, to be fair, she shouldn’t have a body at all anymore. Wasn’t it her idea to make the bomb to send those sons of bitches back?  
  
And there’s no pain, absolutely none at all. Perhaps that was the strangest thing because, as Jo crouches, experimentally, her toes gripping the soles of her boots, fingers in the smooth shag of the carpet like it was from some rich man’s place, her knee doesn’t twinge, the knee she’d banged up and twisted when Gordon taught her how to let the ground catch her when she fell.  
  
That knee doesn’t hurt anymore, and it should hurt, it should hurt bent like this, utterly still, with her hair in her face, split end catching on her dried up lips from where the air had chapped them because she licks them too much.  
  
She stares up at the walls, at the gold filigree climbing up the pillars supporting the ceiling. There’s a long table that could seat ten, maybe twenty or more, but there’s just her and a steaming bowl of macaroni and cheese with hotdogs cut up on top.  
  
Just like her dad used to make it.  
  
She wants to taste, she wants to taste so bad because it’s been too long since dad spooned some into her bowl, been too long since she felt his rough hands pulling her hair into pigtails, but she remembers the stories.  
  
Don’t eat the food of the fairies, and if ghosts existed and demons and angels too, then maybe so did they, and it would not be wise to eat or she could be trapped here forever and there’s a war on, and she needs to get out right the fuck now, find Mom, find everyone else and kill the devil and his legions like goddamn heroes.  
  
“Not quite,” a voice says from behind.  
  
Jo slips her knife from her boot, swings around and ducks low, but sees no one. “Come out,” she says, hoping the tremble in her voice isn’t quite so obvious to the other person.  
  
“I’m here. Your human eyes are just—insufficient.”  
  
“Yeah, well, we’re not all perfect.” Jo settles up against the corner so that nobody could sneak up behind her. There’s a small shelf nearby with the statue of an angel standing on it, robed and playing a harp. Jo flinches at it because it’s strange, isn’t it, to see something so much like earth in a place like this, a place with four walls and a ceiling but no door and disembodied voices. She swallows hard. “You got a name?”  
  
The voice laughs, and then says something that short circuits Jo’s brain into static snow. She cries out, hands over her ears, knife dropped to her feet. She brings her palms back red and wet with blood.  
  
“Mouth too small with not enough tongues and not enough teeth,” the voice says, the sound of it sheering through Jo’s skin smooth as a knife.  “Do you suppose ‘Hester’ is small and soft enough for you to stomach, baby bird?”  
  
“Hester,” Jo says, mouth dry and voice rasping around the name, “this has been real nice, but it’s time for me to go.” She crouches, the wall a rough scrape against her back, picks up her father's knife.  
  
“Go where?” Hester says.  
  
“Well, to get my mom, for one thing,” Jo says. “Where you hiding her, and I swear to god if you’ve harmed her in any way--”  
  
“God?” And Hester laughs and laughs and laughs until Jo finds herself pressed up against the wall, head tipped back, Hester’s voice hard in her ear, “Do not speak to me of God.”  
  
“Okay,” Jo says. “If you’ve harmed her, I will find a way to kill you.” The pressure against her chest lets up, and the wall no longer crushes her back and her sides. She can breathe again.  
  
“Only an angel can kill another angel,” Hester says almost sweetly. “We know these things intimately.”  
  
Jo blinks because she’s speaking to an angel, another real angel, and maybe her knees do go a little weak that she, Jo Harvelle, human, has been graced to speak with the mouthpieces of god, twice over.  
  
And sure god’s a prick, but he’s still god, and they’re still angels, and even when they’re in trench coats, they don’t use door handles and they don’t feel alcohol numbing their bodies if they even happen to have bodies, and they are angels who don’t bother to say be ye not afraid because you should be afraid, Jo knew, you should be terrified.  
  
The terror tastes like metal and blood in her gums and her teeth, but Jo clenches her fists.  “Tell me.”  
  
“She’s in heaven.”  
  
“With Dad?” Jo says, hating the way her breath hitches.  
  
“Only soulmates share a heaven,” Hester says. “And is that what you want? To see Daddy again? They leave, you know. They leave and they don’t come back. Isn’t that what happened to you? Do you think he’d even recognize you?”  
  
“Do you think yours would recognize you?” because on the inside, she’s only five years old.  
  
“Well, if I’ve never seen the face of God then how could I expect Him to even recognize mine? But enough of this,” Hester says.  
  
The presence settles beside Jo, ominous and heavy and wet like the air before a storm, before the tornadoes touch down and ravage the land.   
  
“Do you want to get back into the fight?”  
  
“Aren’t I dead?” Jo says. The words weigh down her tongue and she hangs her head, slumping against the wall, hips out.   
  
“You don’t have to be--or did you never read the story of Lazarus rising?” Hester laughs, then. “People die all the time and come back--Jesus. Dean. Sam. Don’t you wish it was you? Aren’t you tired of all this, of fighting until your hands are bloody and there’s blood and guts in your mouth and the only reward you have is heaven, where you relive your pallid greatest hits as if that could satisfy. Don’t you ever just want to stand up and say no more?”  
  
Jo bites her lip, scuffs her toes against the carpet. “While you’re punching them bloody in the face?” She flexes her hand, buries her knuckles in the meat of her thigh.   
  
“Something like that,” Hester says. “So what do you say? You’re gonna say yes?”  
  
“Yes to what?” Jo says.  
  
“To me. To become my vessel. So that we can return to the war once more.”  
  
Jo chokes a little, wipes her mouth with her hand, still surprised it comes back with a little spit instead of red and bloody. “I thought ‘no’ was the word of the day.”   
  
“It still is. After you say ‘yes.’”   
  
“Your vessel, huh? What does that mean?”  
  
“You allow me to walk on earth without blazing out the eyes of those who look upon my face,” Hester says.   
  
Jo shrugs. “Surprised you care, to be honest.”  
  
“I don’t,” Hester says. “But it’s easier to fight a war when people can’t tell you’re actually an angel. You’re a hunter, I thought for sure you’d understand. After all, don’t you ever find which way the wind carries? Don’t you ever walk in the waters so that they lose the scent of you?”   
  
“I do,” Jo says, remembering when she had hidden herself in a torn up deer carcass half eaten by a wendigo so that the monster would lose her scent (shot him with a flare gun in the back later, never even smelled her coming). Five showers and bubble baths later and she had still been vomiting from the smell in her nose.   
  
“So do you say yes? The war between heaven and hell? It’s not going to win itself as we stand here talking,” Hester says.   
  
Jo sucks on her lip, pushes herself from the wall, hands punched into her jean pockets. “One condition--it’s a team effort here. I’m not your puppet.”   
  
“You’re presumptuous,” Hester says.   
  
“Of course I am--it’s my body.”  
  
“Your blown to pieces body.”  
  
“And yet you still want it anyways.” Jo spits in her palm, sticks her hand out to air, feeling foolish but hey old habits die hard. “We got a deal?”  
  
“We’re each our own little soldiers,” Hester says.  
  
Icy hot pressure slips along her skin--the closest thing to a handshake Jo figures a wavelength of celestial intent can make.   
  
“Cross your heart, hope to die, pinky promise,” Jo says.   
  
“Enough! Just say it: will you be my vessel?”  
  
Jo bites the inside of her cheek, wrinkles of up her face into a frown as she stares at her boots, ragged and worn from running and kicking. Her dad’s knife is heavy, slung through her belt loop. Somewhere, Mom’s out there, and her friends, and Jo’s friends, and a falling angel.    
  
“Isn’t this what you do? Saving people? Didn’t you say it was worth it?”  
  
“Shut up and let me think,” Jo says. She wonders, suddenly, about Castiel’s vessel. Hadn’t they said his name was Jimmy? She wishes she could ask him. She wonders if he’s still alive, somewhere in there.   
  
She remembers putting herself out there as bait so many times because monsters always underestimated her, only ever saw her as a girl with pigtails. How could she be dangerous? Remembers how sour it is always swallowing up that pride--hey I’m a fucking hunter too, I’m nobody’s meat you sons of bitches--so that she can sit still and small like a child once more, how the pride and the hope and the job well done when she sends someone on their way to a home once more safe almost takes the hurt and frustration away.   
  
And what if she was just once more turning herself into somebody’s meatsuit? Angels lied, she was sure, she’d watched Castiel long enough to know, listened long enough to realize that angels are dicks, just like everyone else, and they lie, lie, lie.   
  
Jo figures that everything good requires a sacrifice of some sort, so she says, “Fuck it. Yeah. Let’s do it.”  
  
It’s like cannon-balling into a frozen lake, cold splintering its way into the palms of her hands, the balls of her feet. Jo’s lungs freeze as Hester pours into her, brain blipping panic at the lack of oxygen, at the pillar of light that comes up from her throat and her eyes because even sealing her lids shut there’s nothing but bright suns burning through her.   
  
She falls to the floor, pants heavily on her knees and fists, tries to crawl forward and laughs at the rug burn on her knees.   
  
Jo staggers to her feet, hands running along the hard lines of her collarbones and her hips, her soft belly and her breasts. “I’m still me,” she gasps. “You didn’t lie.”  
  
“Not like our fathers and our brothers,” Hester says. “We’re going.”  
  
The shift is sudden, a little jarring and Jo feels nauseous, sea sick and car sick, but she’s still there even though her body’s blipped away from the special room and they’re standing on the battlefield, surrounded by angels and demons and monsters and men. A silver sword--one that looks like Castiel’s angel sword--is heavy in her hand while Jo slides her father’s knife from her belt loop, holds it in her left hand even though she only ever wielded it in her right.   
  
“We don’t need your pig sticker,” Hester says.  
  
“Too bad, I want it anyways,” Jo says, as Hester presses their palm against a demon, burns the smoke right out of it, letting its host collapse in a heap at their feet. “You know,” Jo says as Hester analyzes the field, tries to find the best position to attack, “it’s not like we need to cover our tracks anymore. It’s already war. I’m not just Jo Harvelle anymore and you’re not just some angel in a meatsuit. What do they say about angels? Six wings? Lion heads? Do you have a lion’s head?” Jo says, whispering. “Please say yes.”  
  
“You couldn’t even possibly comprehend,” Hester says. “Stop distracting me.”  
  
“Think how much damage you could do though,” Jo says. “Imagine, ravaging the battle field, prowling like a lion, your claws sharper than your angel blade, crushing jaws stronger than your--my--our fist. We’d crash and burn and send them all back to hell.”  
  
Jo would have appreciated a warning, perhaps, when red hot fire burns down her back, forcing her to stagger to her knees, one trembling arm supporting them both, as skin peels back from her shoulders, as bone splits and reshapes itself. But she doesn’t even have enough time to grit out a “fuck” when she sees the jet feathers ruffling around her boots.   
  
Maybe Hester has eyes somewhere not in the front of their face, because Jo doesn’t even have to crane her neck around to see three sets of raven wings flex from her back, poised to lift off, to catch the wind, to strike with the bite of the angel blade still clutched in Hester’s hand, to buffer with the force of their strength.   
  
“Holy shit,” Jo whispers, even as Hester pushes from the ground, all six wings spread wide as she soars to the thickest part of the fight, their sword flashing fury. Jo knows that they are beautiful and they are terrible in that moment as they swoop upon their enemies, impossibly tall, their features frozen into something like purpose, their wings blotting out the sun.  
  
  



End file.
